Monday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to the top o’ the week again: Monday, June 16, 2025, and National Fudge Day, a confection good in nearly all its forms.  Here’s how it’s made at the Jersey shore, and it’s a bit tricky:

It’s also Bloomsday, celebrating the Dublin wanderings of Leopold Bloom on this day in 1906, related in Ulysses, Fresh Veggies Day, World Sea Turtle Day, National Vinegar Day, National Tortilla Day, National Take Your Cat to Work Day (good luck!), and National Cannoli Day, which reminds me of this scene from The Godfather:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The suspect in the murder of two Minnesota lawmakers and wounding of two other people has been apprehended:

A man suspected of assassinating a Minnesota state lawmaker and shooting another was arrested on Sunday, officials said, ending a two-day manhunt that rattled the state.

Investigators had pursued the suspect, identified as Vance Boelter, 57, throughout the weekend, as Minnesotans reeled from the killings of Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman. In a separate attack, the gunman also wounded State Senator John A. Hoffman and his wife, Yvette Hoffman, at their home in the Minneapolis suburbs.

“One man’s unthinkable actions have altered the state of Minnesota,” Gov. Tim Walz said at a news conference on Sunday night.

The suspect was charged with two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of attempted second-degree murder, according to a criminal complaint obtained by The New York Times.

*I hadn’t heard this, but a gaffe by a Republican Senator has now become a rallying cry: “We are all going to die.” (Sounds like Country Joe and the Fish). I’ve put her gaffe in bold:

A one-sentence gaffe from Iowa’s junior senator has become a line of attack against Republicans nationally, with Democratic fundraising solicitations, political ads, social media and T-shirts now highlighting her words heading into the midterm elections.

Sen. Joni Ernst’s response of “we all are going to die” to a constituent who was complaining about proposed Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” has also helped produce a 2026 GOP primary challenger for her and prompted several Iowa Democrats to announce bids for her seat.

The incident has shone a fresh spotlight on the Republican Party’s political vulnerabilities as well as Ernst’s uncertain political future, with some Iowa watchers wondering whether she will stand for re-election. She angered Trump’s MAGA allies last year, delayed her trademark summer motorcycle ride until the fall, and now has become the face of what Democrats paint as Republican cruelty toward poor people.

. . . Democrats accuse Republicans of cutting Medicaid spending to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) playfully calling the GOP bill the “Well, We’re All Going to Die Act.” ‘

. . . .Ernst’s utterance at a May 30 town hall was prompted by a Democrat in the audience who was yelling that people would die if the Medicaid cuts become law.

The senator doubled down on her original comment a day after she made it with a sarcastic apology video that appeared to be filmed in a cemetery. She said she assumed everyone knows “we are all going to perish from this Earth” and added that she was glad she didn’t have to bring up “the tooth fairy as well.”

Well, it’s as good a rallying cry as any, and Medicaid cuts will certainly lead to some people dying, but not all of us.  In my view, “No Kings” is far better. (The anti-Trump protest rallies on Saturday, by the way, far exceeded the size of groups who voluntarily came out to cheer Trump.)

*While Nicholas Kristof and Tom “I am dumb” Friedman are wringing their hands over the new war between Israel and Iran, Bret Stephens, always the most sensible NYT op-ed writer on the war, has a piece called “Israel had the courage to do what needed to be done.”

In plain English, Iran has been deceiving the world for years while gathering the means to build multiple nuclear weapons. In a better world, diplomacy would have forestalled and perhaps eliminated the need for Israeli military action.

But President Trump, who tried to dissuade Israel from striking, failed to get a deal after five rounds of negotiations and noted this week that Tehran had become “much more aggressive” in the talks. Make of his testimony what you will, but it’s worth recalling that a much more pliant and patient Biden administration spent years trying to reach an agreement, and also gave up in frustration with Iran’s repeated prevarications.

As for other alternatives, the clandestine means of sabotage and targeted assassinations that Israel had long used, and which probably delayed Iran’s nuclear breakout moment by years, had plainly run their course — otherwise, Israel would have continued to use them rather than risk Iranian retaliatory strikes using drones and missiles that could overwhelm Israel’s defenses.

Those strikes have begun. But they underscore, from an Israeli point of view, how crucial it is that Iran be prevented from being able to mount any of those missiles with a nuclear warhead. Academic theorists in, say, Chicago may be convinced that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would merely help create a stable balance against a nuclear-armed Israel.

Yet that fails to take into account the millenarian mind-set of some of Iran’s theocratic leaders, for whom the ideological objective of destroying Israel may be worth the price of mass martyrdom in a nuclear exchange. It also ignores the prospect that an Iranian nuclear bomb would lead Saudi Arabia, and perhaps Turkey and Egypt, to seek nukes of their own. How stable is a balance of terror if there are three, four or five nuclear powers in the world’s most volatile region, operating in uncertain diplomatic combinations, each at daggers drawn with the others?

. . . Also worth noting is that Hezbollah has been quiet since Israel’s attack. That could always change, but it’s a result of its swift decimation at Israeli hands last September. That, too, was denounced by Israel’s critics as dangerously escalatory. But now it’s paying dividends in the form of constricted Iranian retaliatory options, the end of the pro-Iranian regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the first possibility in two generations for the Lebanese people finally to govern themselves.

. . .It also matters that Iran’s leadership has again been bested on its home turf, not by the “Great Satan” of the United States but, much more humiliatingly, by the “Little Satan” of Israel. The weaker and more uncertain the regime looks in the eyes of ordinary Iranians, the likelier it will spark the kinds of mass protests that nearly brought it down in 2022. An end to the regime that has inflicted so much misery on so many people for so many years offers the only sure route to ending the nuclear crisis for good.

I’m writing in the first hours of a conflict that surely still has many surprises in store. It’s far too soon to say how it will end. But for those who worry about a future in which one of the world’s most awful regimes takes advantage of international irresolution to gain possession of the most dangerous weapons, Israel’s strike is a display of clarity and courage for which we may all one day be grateful.

*And the Times of Israel tells us “How an Israeli-American deception campaign lulled Iran into a false sense of security.”

Israel and the US carried out a multi-faceted misinformation campaign in recent days to convince Iran that a strike on its nuclear facilities was not imminent, an Israeli official told The Times of Israel on Friday.

The official asserted that US President Donald Trump was an active participant in the ruse, and knew about the military operation since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to move forward with the strike on Monday.

Some parts of the ruse:

Netanyahu and Trump spoke by phone for 40 minutes that same day. At the time, unnamed officials leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 that Trump had told Netanyahu in a “dramatic” conversation to remove an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites from the agenda as negotiations continue. According to the TV report, Trump stressed that there would be no discussions on a military strike until the president concluded that nuclear talks with Iran had failed.

This, the Israeli official argued on Friday, had all been untrue.

. . .At the same time, Israel had to sell Iran a believable story, and not ignore the nuclear issue. Instead, Israel wanted Tehran to think it was still debating the matter of a potential strike with the White House.

It thus announced that Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and Mossad Chief David Barnea would take off for talks with US special envoy Steve Witkoff ahead of the next round of talks between Tehran and Washington, set for Sunday, claiming the trip was meant to “clarify Israel’s position.”

The Prime Minister’s Office wouldn’t even answer a direct question from The Times of Israel as to where the purported meeting was to take place. It is now clear that the meeting was never on the schedule.

. . .Israel clearly hoped the Iranians would believe there was no way it would attack before the Sunday talks.

On all fronts, Israel sought to put forth an air of business as usual. Netanyahu’s office put out a statement on Thursday stressing that despite some media reports to the contrary amid the rising regional tensions, he would not be canceling his weekend vacation in the north.

. . . Trump contributed to the effort. “He played the game together with Israel,” said the Israeli official. “It was a whole coordination.”

Trump said Thursday that an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites “could very well happen” but advised against it, saying the possibility of a deal was “fairly close” if Tehran compromised on its atomic ambitions in ongoing talks with the US.

There is more, but the important parts are that the Trump administration was part of the ruse, and is collaborating with Israel, and Israel, after the security disaster of October 7, is back on the beam, taking out Hezbollah (with Beepergate!), much of Hamas, and now this surprise attack on Iran. I’m not quite as pessimistic about Israel’s future as I used to be.

BTW, Iran is committing war crimes by attacking civilians in Israeli, while the IDF warns Iranian citizens before an attack.  Will there be publicity about Iran’s crimes? Of course not!

Here are two headlines from yesterday’s NYT:

and….

*You may note that I put up relatively few posts from Bluesky as opposed to Twitter, as the former is a “nice” site that avoids political discussion and, above all, heterodox opinions. This “bubble” is described by Josh Barro on his Very Serious site; the post is called, “Bluesky isn’t a bubble. It’s a containment dome.”

My friend Megan McArdle warns in a column that the social media platform Bluesky is a harmful bubble for liberals. By decamping together for Bluesky, she writes, liberals have cloistered themselves in a place where their views won’t be challenged. And because the conversational norms on Bluesky are so hostile and obnoxious — do you ever use AI? Former “Reply All” host Alex Goldman wants you to know you should be thrown into a volcano — the platform fails to appeal beyond its niche political audience, is losing users, and is unlikely to become a place where posting is a good way to influence public opinion.

Megan correctly describes these dynamics, but she’s wrong about them being harmful. In fact, these dynamics are why Bluesky is an important harm reduction tool for liberals. Twitter used to be a place where the most neurotic and censorious liberal influencers were highly effective at influencing events within media organizations and the Democratic Party. But was that actually ever good for liberal causes?

. . . A lot of the blame for the self-inflicted wounds of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary should go to The Groups: it was the ACLU that got Kamala Harris to commit to taxpayer-funded sex changes for criminals and detained migrants. But one of the reasons Democrats didn’t realize it was a big mistake to make promises and statements that made them sound wacky was that they were constantly being yelled at on Twitter by people whose unpopular viewpoints they mistook for broad public opinion.1 The screamers won the battle but they lost the war: they pressured their own candidates into manufacturing attack ad fodder for Republicans, and as a result, Donald Trump is president again.

The “screamers” are presumably loud “progressive” liberals.

. . . There is much to regret about the ways Elon Musk has changed Twitter. But there’s been one obvious change for the better: By rupturing the Twitter user base, he (accidentally?) created a firewall between the most maladjusted liberal posters on the internet and the reporters, Democratic politicians and operatives who used to pay an excessive amount of attention to their harangues. (Media reporter Max Tani wrote about this for Semafor last month: “I spoke with a few congressional staffers who said that they had tried using Bluesky as an alternative to Twitter after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, but they gave up after their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence.”) I believe the emergence of this firewall is one reason for the renaissance that we were seeing at WelcomeFest last week: Democrats are becoming more cognizant of public opinion and less fearful of breaking with the activist base because they are no longer receiving so much activist messaging in the form of aggrieved Twitter push alerts on their phones.

. . . The problem with a “bubble” is that it prevents the people inside from accessing the information on the outside. But the core functionality of Bluesky is not that it keeps information out; it’s that it keeps information in. Like the containment dome over a nuclear reactor, Bluesky serves the important safety purpose of ensuring that whatever meltdowns occur within produce minimal fallout. So while I’m not on Bluesky, I value the platform, and I encourage its users to continue screaming at each other about how much the rest of us all suck. Please do not leave.

So his thesis is that liberals on Bluesky are insulated from the progressive Left and thus will confect a moderate Democratic party. Would it were so! I find Bluesky curiously anodyne as well as censorious: very critical of “heterodox” people like Jesse Singal. But the Bluesky dictum is to protect moderate liberals from hearing anything outside their bubble, but there’s a lot going on outside that bubble, including AOC and Bernie Sanders’s propaganda tour. And some of that stuff is going to hurt Democrats in general.  Does Bluesky really think its liberal base needs to be protected from free speech?

*You’ve surely heard that residents of Barcelona are really peeved at the number of tourists in their beautiful city, a number that’s causing severe problems. And now some of those residents are packing guns to attack the tourists—water guns.

Protesters used water pistols against unsuspecting tourists in Barcelona on Sunday as demonstrators marched to demand a re-think of an economic model they believe is fueling a housing crunch and erasing the character of the Spanish city.

“The squirt guns are to bother the tourists a bit,” Andreu Martínez said with a chuckle after spritzing a couple seated at an outdoor cafe. “Barcelona has been handed to the tourists. This is a fight to give Barcelona back to its residents.”

Martínez, a 42-year-old administrative assistant, is one of a growing number of residents who are convinced that tourism has gone too far in the city of 1.7 people. Barcelona hosted 15.5 visitors last year eager to see Antoni Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia basilica and the Las Ramblas promenade.

That’s 9.1 tourists to every resident!

Martínez says his rent has risen over 30% as more apartments in his neighborhood are rented to tourists for short-term stays. He said there is a knock-on effect of traditional stores being replaced by businesses catering to tourists, like souvenir shops, burger joints and “bubble tea” spots.

“Our lives, as lifelong residents of Barcelona, is coming to an end,” he said. “We are being pushed out systematically.”

Similar demonstrations against tourism are slated in several other Spanish cities on Sunday, including on the Balearic islands of Mallorca and Ibiza, as well as in the Italian postcard city of Venice, Portugal’s capital Lisbon and other cities across southern Europe — marking the first time a protest against tourism has been coordinated across the region.

In Barcelona, protesters blew whistles and chanted, “Everywhere you look, all you see are tourists.” They held up homemade signs saying “One more tourist, one less resident” and “Your Airbnb was my home.” They stuck stickers saying “Citizen Self-Defense,” in Catalan, and “Tourist Go Home,” in English, with a drawing of a water pistol on the doors of hotels and hostels.

. . . There was tension when the march stopped in front of a large hostel, where a group emptied their water guns at two workers positioned in the entrance. They also set off firecrackers next to the hostel and opened a can of pink smoke. One worker spat at the protestors as he slammed the hostel’s doors.

. . .Cities across the world are struggling with how to cope with overtourism and a boom in short-term rental platforms, like Airbnb, but perhaps nowhere has surging discontent been so evident as in Barcelona, where protesters first took to firing squirt guns at tourists during a protest last summer.

Spaniards have also staged several large protests in Barcelona, Madrid and other cities in recent years to demand lower rents. There has also been a confluence of the pro-housing and anti-tourism struggles: When thousands marched through the streets of Spain’s capital in April, some held homemade signs saying “Get Airbnb out of our neighborhoods.”

Can you blame the residents? (Overall in Spain last year, there were two tourists for every resident.) For sure Barcelona is one of the world’s loveliest cities, but when I walked down the Ramblas some years ago, it was already mostly tourists and way too crowded. Still, I would urge people to visit it for its beauties, which include some of the world’s finest architecture, including Gaudi’s now-completed cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, which I found stunning despite the Guardia Civil having detained me in the church strip-searching me. (I was falsely accused by two British tourists of having pickpocketed their money and passports, a story I’ve already told.)  But don’t stay long, and there are less crowded parts of Spain that have their own allure (try Galicia).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s question is answered with a double response. When I asked Malgorzata what it meant, she said, “Anything you want:  Viruses are mico. human bodies are macro. Viruses can destroy human bodies. Israel is micro, Iran is macro. It seems that Israel is destroying Iran.

Hili: What is the difference between micro and macro?

Andrzej: Huge, but micro often destroys macro.

Hili: Jaka jest różnica między mikro i makro?

Ja: Ogromna, ale mikro często niszczy makro.=

*******************

From Now That’s Wild:

From Cats that Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From Richard:

The Coyne building from Amy, who writes: “Never noticed this before. The Coyne building at Pico and Crenshaw blvd. In Los Angeles. ( was on my way to a lecture at center for inquiry in LA).”

Now that a war with Israel is on, the Iranian Masih is back tweeting—and rooting for Israel, which threatens to bring down the theocracy that she hates.

Here’s the Google translation of the tweet below:

The Islamic Republic’s insistence on continuing confrontation with Israel is based on illusions, ideological slogans, and unrealistic calculations, and it has no result other than the destruction of our Iran. A disaster whose costs will not only be political, but also human and security. And what’s even more bitter is that these costs will be paid with the lives of people who have no role or authority in these decision-making. How long will the Iranian people have to pay the price for a war that was neither their choice nor their benefit?

اصرار جمهوری اسلامی بر تداوم تقابل‌جویانه با اسرائیل، بر اساس توهمات و‌ شعارهای ایدئولوژیک و محاسبات غیرواقع‌بینانه است و بس و هیچ نتیجه‌ای ندارد جز ویرانی ایران ما.

فاجعه‌ای که هزینه‌های آن نه صرفاً سیاسی، بلکه انسانی و امنیتی خواهد بود. و نکته‌ی تلخ‌تر آن‌که، این هزینه‌ها از… pic.twitter.com/6EmVZz84pn

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) June 15, 2025

From Barry; geese don’t want no stinking kings, either!

Even Mother Nature is done with Felon47’s bullshit.

— Jason (@gizmosspace.bsky.social) 2025-06-15T15:11:45.451Z

From Simon: Trump trolled by Russians in a spoof video:

the video:

— George Conway 👊🇺🇸🔥 (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2025-06-15T16:05:36.644Z

I can’t remember who sent me the first one below, but the second one that I saw below it is the one I really love:

As if you were in the flock pic.twitter.com/CxxBulY7a6

— 🌐NorthnileRiser|Curious Explorer (@NorthnileRiser) June 14, 2025

From Malcolm, a human transformer:

Impressive transformation by a street artist.pic.twitter.com/b4RHlBCbZB

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 28, 2025

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A 58-year-old Dutch Jewish woman was gassed to death immediately up arriving at Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-16T09:30:29.080Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb, who’s nearly recovered form his respiratory ills. First, a live cowrie, a mollusc whose shells are often collected. They’re much nicer alive

Hello ₍₍⁽⁽🐚₎₎⁾⁾ Hello

— でんか (@k-hermit.com) 2025-06-14T03:47:58.910Z

And Matthew calls this siphonophore video “Amazing”:

Stunning #siphonophore video by @mbarinews.bsky.social ! youtu.be/lp4UNEvxoWo?…

— Chris Mah (@echinoblog.bsky.social) 2025-06-15T15:01:35.321Z